Cold Milestones
by Losseflame
Summary: In which Alec discovers that a lot of who you are is found in what you remember, Magnus is displeased, Jace and Clary need to talk things out, and Downworlders take a leaf out of Valentine's book when it comes to organized uprisings.  AU after Cog
1. In Which Alec Is Not Particularly Lucky

This is AU after City of Glass.

Cold Milestones Chapter One

Mortal danger isn't anything new to Alec. He's used to the icy rush of adrenaline, the heavy pounding of his heart, the jarring of his bones as he fights. He's been a fighter since he was a child, born and raised to wield blades, shoot arrows, and kill things. It's the family business, almost inasmuch as having dysfunctional relationships is. True, he always was better at the researching part of things than his other two siblings (and finally he can include Jace in that category of his mind without wincing), but at the end of the day, this is where his heart lay. In the ichor-splattered alleys, in the push-pull of muscles working, in the heavy, self-satisfied power that comes from taking something evil down.

In some ways, Alec's always been most comfortable when he's fighting.

The thing is, in middle of fights, when you're exchanging blows and only a half-second ahead of your opponent, reality narrows down to what's in front of you. The rest of the world fades, leaving nothing but the next move, the movement to block, the strike to attack. There's no room in your head for anything other than the foe('s', if he's being technical) in front of you and how to get rid of them. You can't bother yourself with what-if's and should-I's and what's-next, can't fear your every expression and move and word you say. There's nothing to hide when you're fighting, nothing to be ashamed of or afraid of. Especially not of yourself, if you're as good at fighting as Alec is.

It's the only situation where he truly feels safe in mind, not that anyone but him has noticed. Funnily enough, most people assume fighting is what he likes the least as part of his job as a Shadowhunter, unable to grasp that just because he's more cautious, he's in no way less enthusiastic.

Alec ducks an attack from an eerily feline demon, digging a knife into its gut and yanking it to the side, black ichor spraying over his forearm and grey entrails hitting the ground with a sickening 'plop' before dissolving. He turns on his heel, slipping under an attack from a demon behind him. He buries the knife in the demon's throat and twists his wrist, and the demon gurgles before falling. It digs its claws into Alec's side weakly as it does so, one last spiteful move before death. Alec hisses in pain as the skin over his ribcage opens over bone. The claws of the body, Alec notes with slight foreboding before they disappear, had something sticky and dark secreted from them, and he prays to a god he only half believes in that the poison is slow-acting enough for him to be done with the fight before he needs an iratze.

The ichor coating his arms and hands smells like a mix of sickly sweet decomposition and rust, and it blends with Alec's blood dripping onto the pavement to form an ugly purplish colour. He claps a free hand over the wound in his side, trying to staunch the blood flow, grimacing. The wound itself is nothing fatal, just particularly painful to deal with. It's the poison he needs to worry about.

Being safe in mind always comes with a high price, he supposes with a thin smile.

(Smiling in fights has only ever start After Magnus, and it's one of the only things Alec faults him for; Izzy has commented more than once that while Jace looks like a dashing hero when he smiles in fights, Alec just looks like a serial killer.)

The gathering of multiple demons in a single area wasn't unheard of before Valentine's work, but it wasn't common. This is the third time it's happened in the city post-Valentine, and at each incident the number of demons increased. From what Alec had gathered from his parents, occurrences like these have been happening all over the world, so much so that a few in the Council would be saying it was strategized if the placements of these attacks weren't completely random. As it is, they just assume that the battle in Alicante had a few unforeseen side effects.

Which would be comforting, if for the fact that Alec has to deal with it.

Alec can hear Jace swearing frantically somewhere behind him, and judging from the few words in Jace's tirade that aren't curses Alec can make out, Clary has jumped into something over her head without thinking. Again. He sighs before swivelling his head to look for her, hoisting his blades higher. She may be exceedingly irritating, but she has a habit of growing on people, and Alec has subconsciously started to include her in his mental list of People He Is Responsible For During Fights. Capitalized with annoyance.

Instead for finding Clary, however, he finds himself face to face with a prekian demon.

It has a disjointed form, the limbs too long and skinny, the shoulders too slim and the head too large. It jerks, arms bending at its two joints as it approaches Alec it a fashion that seems too quick for its broken gait.

Alec mumbles a few choice words, taking a step back as the thing moved closer, out of range for his bow. The adrenaline is making him twitchy, his sweat turning cold and his skin turning feverish. The wound on his side is stinging with the grit the wind had swept into it and the poison Alec has concluded is probably not as slow acting as he had hoped.

He raises his knives and is shocked at how badly his arms are shaking. Not slow acting at all, then. Fear hasn't quite had time to make it into his mind yet, still focused as it is on the demon at hand, but he still wishes he had time for a quick iratze.

The prekian wails, and Alec gives up on his dream of iratzes and world peace for everyone he steadies himself for an attack. It throws its arms out and bears down on him, hitting him with what feels like the force of a fright train and the black fabric hanging off its arms cocooning him in a demented embrace.

Alec drives his knives in and up its chest cavity as he goes down, rolling over to straddle it as best he can. The breath of the creature chokes off with a gurgle. He shivers as the body disintegrates underneath him and looks around.

He's in an abandoned factory, judging from the concrete floor and skeletons of equipment.

Last time he checked, he was in an alley fighting off a horde of demons with his parabatai, his parabatai's girlfriend/former sister, and his (unquestioned) sister.

His skin gets so hot it's cold – or is it so cold it's hot? – and his stomach tries to rebel against him as a dictionary definition rhymed off in his head, automatic.

_Prekian: a pack demon that possesses the ability to relocate itself by a self-contained portal. A 'sighter' often uses this ability to transport prey back to the nest of its pack, to be used-_

Alec swallows, his mouth dry as he fumbles for his stele. He needs an iratze. Putting one hand on the cold floor, he rises stiffly.

_ -to be used in the ritualistic slaughters they partake in every cycle of the new moon._

There's no moon out tonight.

A yowlemanates from the corner, and Alec readies his bow, grimacing at the feel of dried blood chafing between his fingers. Apparently, iratzes would have to wait.

Two prekians scuttle towards him, their nails screeching as they scrape across the concrete.

Alec shoots one in the black cavity where an eye should be, meeting the other halfway with his knife and slicing off its head. It bounces hideously before dissolving, prompting a few others to approach, twitching and shuddering their way towards him.

Alec's head pounds feverishly and his vision swims out of focus as his wound burns and his balance wobbles dangerously. He really needs a damned iratze.

Adrenaline surges through his veins at the sound of something approaching, and the other intangible sense of his surroundings let out warning bells. Alec lashes out blindly, feeling his knife sink into spongy flesh and warm liquid trickling over his hands, replacing the crusty blood on his hands with fresh. There's a nails-on-a-chalkboard screech that sounds more enraged than pained, and Alec hazards a guess that he didn't hit anything vital.

There's sounds of retreat, thank the Angel, and Alec takes the time to shake his head and pray that it stops swimming. It doesn't, but he feels a tad more fit for movement when he's done.

Two unwounded prekians lope towards him again, and he lowers his stance, dodging one's attempt at tearing his throat out and slicing its throat easily, its battle cry cut short and replaced by liquid burbling. Alec readies the knife to dispatch the other one, shifting his weight to the balls of his feet to face the other one.

He turns.

Stops.

Strikes.

His breath comes out in a wordless gush as his knife bears down on the prekian.

And he sucks it in with a gasp as the prekian's fingers pierces his stomach.

.:.:.

"Where the _hell_ is Alec?" Jace's voice is furious, liquid fire and righteous indignation and a load of other crap that wasn't there before his balls dropped. Isabelle rolls her eyes and gets ready to whip out a scathing remark, because _really_, Jace, is it that hard to _look_ for once before throwing a temper tantrum? Alec doesn't follow him like a lost puppy anymore, and apparently Jace is still adapting to the idea that Alec isn't the Spock to his Kirk any longer.

And it's good that he isn't, actually. Isabelle has had enough pseudo-incest crises to last her a lifetime.

She glances around, fully expecting Alec to be doing a last sweep of the alley like the obsessive compulsive once-was closet case he is, instead seeing nothing but Clary dithering over Jace and an indecent about disappearing carnage. Really, this 'shitton of different demons banding together to fuck shit up'? Not her thing.

Isabelle rolls her eyes again even though no one's watching her as she hears Clary mumbling defensively. The poor girl still hadn't yet mastered the use of her feminine superiority.

After a few minutes of this nonsense, Isabelle frowns and shifts her weight. Seriously, where is Alec? She had a date to get to, and Isabelle doubted that Magnus was peachy keen on the idea of Alec being held up for too long on a friggin' Saturday.

Neither is she, come to think of it.

"Alec? Can we _go_?" She walks forwards a couple steps, past the bickering couple. Her steps echo weirdly in the alley, and Isabelle pushes down the anxiety rising in the pit of her gut. They'd been in situations like these before, she reminds herself, and they always ended with Alec popping up somewhere and dithering over how many demons there were and how many different types showed up and deciding to spent three hours in the library researching things when they got back.

Isabelle is so intent on comforting herself she's completely – well, not completely, but much more than she usually is – surprised by a demon.

It wails, and she curls her upper lip in disgust. It looks like an ugly love child of a human and Shelob the Spider. The ugly thing grabs at her, curling overlong fingers around her wrist. She flicks her whip, coiling it around the creature's neck and yanking hard.

Blood burbles over its lips as it seizes once, twice, and collapses.

Isabelle yanks again, freeing the whip and turning on her heels and the sound of Jace's hiss of breath.

"Thank you, Jace, for your stunning amount of help in the situation I just found myself. With your aid, I was able to overcome this –"

"Shut up, Isabelle!" Jace's eyes were wide. "Shit. Shit, goddamni-"

"What?" Clary interrupts. "What's the problem? Or can that knowledge not be blessed upon us lower mortals?" She narrows her eyes.

Jace swallowed. "That was a prekian."

Isabelle froze, her blood freezing in her veins. She'd hear of them, but she'd never seen one. They were supposed to be rare, and more importantly, they were supposed to only be found in Europe. She turns her face up to the sky, where a new moon lies in the smog choked sky.

"…are you saying that if I hadn't killed that thing fast enough I would have been Shadowhunter-napped, killed in a ritualistic fashion involving strangling me with my intestines, and eaten?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

Clary looks nauseated, glancing at where the body of the Shelob-man used to be. "What does this have to do with your epiphany?"

Jace started to lace and unlace his fingers, and Isabelle has to resist the urge to cut his hands off, her protective sister instincts wailing frantically.

"I saw one try to attack Alec earlier, and he isn't here now."

Isabelle feels her gut drop.

A/N: Reviews would be lovely~ What did you think?


	2. In Which Magnus is Not Pleased

Cold Milestones Chapter 2

Anne Liu has been an emergency paramedic in New York for five years, and as such she feels like she's seen it all. There've been assaults with plastic utensils, attempted suicides with antifreeze, gang beatings with stolen armchairs, all mixed in with your drive bys and domestic abuse and plain old bar fights.

You see all that, you have an inflated opinion of your experience.

But Anne isn't as egotistical as her co workers. She can admit when she's boggled at the newest insane injury New York spits from her depths.

This is one of those times.

The call comes in at around midnight, hailing her crew to an old factory at the edge of the city, which in itself isn't all that out of the norm. Things happen on the edges of the metropolis, any civil servant worth their salt knows that. True, the caller sounded like a well-groomed young man, not riffraff like at all – which seems out of place for a call to pick up some poor fellow bleeding in an old factory, because what self-respecting young man would spend their time there? – but strangers things have happened.

It's when they get there that Anne feels logic go by the wayside. The caller rushes out to meet them, a frantic expression on his face, and Anne runs a critical eye over him, looking for injuries.

He looks like he's in his early twenties, his hair brown and wavy and his skin a smooth olive. His eyes are shockingly hazel and his polite smile horribly fixed, but aside from the potential shock of finding a half-dead teenager in an old factory, he's uninjured.

Reflexively, he holds out a hand gloved in thin leather for Anne to shake, but Anne brushes past him to move to the slumped figure on the concrete floor. Civility can wait till later.

The boy is wearing all black, and there is a gaping tear in his side that looks like an animal attack, scrapes on his knuckles that comes from punching something hard and repeatedly, and what looks like a hard bang on the back of his head. Anne sighs under her breath and hears her partner do the same.

She's in the middle of doing what she can till the stretcher is ready when she realizes that there's no indication that the boy actually walked in here. Not enough footprints in the dirt for him to have walked in, no blood spills anywhere but a two foot radius of where he's lying. There are intricate patterns on his skin, and Anne would have thought them tattoos if she didn't brush her hand over one of them. They're raised, and Anne gasps as the meaning sinks in.

They're _carved_ into the boy's flesh.

"Marko, hurry up. We need to get him to the hospital _now_." Anne calls back to her partner, and she feels the rosary on her neck now more than ever.

Raised Catholic, she'd been taught to take care of the ones she met that were weaker or helpless. It was half of the reason she chose to be a paramedic anyway. And in her mind, finding a boy scarred six ways till Sunday with what looks like cult markings and multiple wounds in a cold factory in the middle of the night classifies as a time when Anne needs to get her Good Samaritan on.

Once she's gotten the boy loaded onto the back, she looks back to where the caller waits, and she feels a trickle of something akin to suspicion. "What were you doing here?"

The caller raises his eyebrows. "I was scoping out areas to take photographs of later. I'm a photographer."

He does look like an artsy type, Anne concludes. Something tugs at the back of her mind, a little voice that repeats, over and over again, that he's clearly not involved and it's more important to bring the victim to a hospital.

Almost without her command, she sees herself turning back to the ambulance and getting in the back, brushing a lock of dark hair away from his face tenderly.

"Marko, let's get going."

Marko grunts in agreement, wearing a glazed expression, and they drive off.

Had Anne seen the caller without his gloves, she would have recoiled, because he, instead of fingernails, had talons.

Had Anne looked closer at the caller's eyes, she would have noted that the pupil was a reptilian slit.

Had Anne been less susceptible to subconscious manipulation, she would have stayed a bit longer, asked the caller a few more questions, because the caller was most definitely suspicious.

As it were, she keeps the boy in her ambulance stabilized and on painkillers as they drive to the hospital, and the caller watches the ambulance disappear in the distance with a remarkably self-satisfied expression on his face.

_Charity work._ He thinks. _Puts warmth in my heart._

.:.:.

Isabelle is usually good at controlling her emotions.

A lot of people wouldn't believe her if she said that, but outbursts to gain attention and outbursts because she couldn't keep her verifiable Ganges of feeling in check are two very different things.

But it's now 4:00 on a Sunday morning and she's just spent the past five hours looking for her brother who may or may not have been eaten by a bunch of Dementors with anger management issues.

Looking for him, and she has yet to have found him. What she has found is an empty factory still smelling of demons and smeared with red blood along the floor.

The fact that prekians, according to lore, clean up after themselves before moving on after a meal, is not lost on her.

And she sort of always knew that something like this would happen, that one day they'd walk out of the Institute ready to kick ass and not all of them would walk back in afterwards. 'No happy endings' is regulation in the Shadowhunter world, and every time she goes out to fight she damn well makes sure to say goodbye to anyone who matters, whether she uses those words or not.

Backup, you know. Just in case it's the last time she sees them.

But she's never been _ready_ for it. Not when the truth is staring at her straight in the face, obvious in the rust-coloured streaks along the floor and Alec's tangible absence.

Distantly, she hears Clary and Jace catch up with her, hears their reactions (Jace, a stiff, tense silence; Clary, small, quiet sobs), and usually she's good at controlling her emotions but her big brother is _dead_ and that's just not a situation that calls for usual reactions.

So she drops to her knees, spreads one of her hands along one line of blood, hugging herself with the other, and sobs.

Isabelle gives herself five minutes. Five minutes of body-wrenching, throat-destroying, snot-and-tears sobbing, hunching over herself and heaving in shuddering gasps.

Then, she clenches her hands into fists and scrubs her eyes, sniffling once and getting back her feet. Turns to Jace and Clary, where they're still lost in their own sadness.

"We need to get back to the Institute." Her voice loud and steady, and if she didn't have red eyes you wouldn't have been able to tell she was crying. "We need to tell Mom and Dad."

Jace's eyes flick to hers, and she shivers at the coldness there, like a flame running so hot it went cool. The rest of his face is dead still. Corpse-like. He isn't okay.

He isn't okay, but that's fine because it's not like anyone else is.

She doesn't to turn Clary yet, just repeats: "Jace. We need to get back to the Institute."

His face is still cold and remote but he nods in agreement, and then she looks to see Clary wiping her face and trying to steady a wobbling chin. But she squares her shoulders and meets Isabelle's eyes, and on a different day Isabelle would have been proud at the hint of backbone she just showed.

But today she just takes it for what it is and leads the way as they walk back home, with one less person than they set out with.

When they get to the Institute, Isabelle knocks on her parents' door, walking in when she gets a murmured reaction.

Her parents are just sitting up, brushing hair out of their faces and sleep out of their eyes.

"Isabelle, what is it?" Robert says in a tired, rumbling tone. He looks her over, stopping at her red eyes and scraped knees. "Is everything alright?"

"Alec is dead." Her voice is even, and she doesn't waver when she says this.

Maryse reacts with a tightening of her lips and going deadly pale, and Robert puts his arms around her as he turns his face into her hair.

"We're sure. Prekians. It's…I'm going to bed." Isabelle chokes out past the growing lump in her throat, turning away and stumbling out of the room, ignoring her mother's calls for her.

She collapses onto her bed after putting a sigil to lock her room over the doorknob, curling up over the covers. It's then that she notices Alec's old sweater still thrown across the floor when she'd taken it from him.

He'd been planning on going on a date with Magnus later than night, and she'd forbidden him to wear yet another one of his seemingly endless supply of ugly cardigans.

Isabelle is usually good at controlling her emotions.

Now, she curls up tighter and cries, muffling the noises in the pillow.

.:.:.

Magnus has always – well, not always, but for the past two centuries, which is almost always – been comfortable enough with himself and his emotions to admit when he is displeased.

More than admit, actually. Scream it loudly down someone's ear, if he's being honest, which he makes a point of being. It's good for business.

So when he's woken up at five in the morning by the ringing of his cell phone after being stood up by Alec without a single word, he is notably displeased.

Some might even call him livid.

He curls his hand around his cell phone form where it's sitting on his bedside table, flipping it open and cutting off Beyoncé's 'Baby Boy'. "Alec, you have three chances to come up with a good reason as to why I was left high and dry tonight. The first two don't count."

"Um." It's Clary's voice, sounding rough and tired. Magnus's heart clenches as his anger is replaced by fear, and he sits up quickly, turning on the light.

"Clarissa? What is it?" His voice is thin and thready, now, absent of all confidence it had before. "Is Alec hurt?" Magnus can get there in five minutes if he tries hard enough, and he's been studying more healing magic than he previous thought imaginable in preparation for another call like this.

A choked off sob. Magnus grits his teeth as the numbness of denial starts from somewhere in his chest cavity.

He has an idea as to what she's going to say, but it can't be that because he's not _ready_ for it, he was supposed to have a lifetime with Alec, he was supposed to have forever with him, if Magnus could manage it.

"He's dead, Magnus, I'm so sorry, I'm so, so sorry." Clary's voice rings out like the call of the harbinger, dry and painful.

Magnus hangs up, his mind going blank with shock. No pain, not yet.

He turns his cell phone off, disconnects his business phone, and pats the bed for Chairman Meow to leap up.

It's only after the tiny cat is curled in Magnus's lap that the numbness recedes, leaving a pain so vast and consuming he has no tears to cry.

Instead, he presses a hand to his (hollow, cold) chest and breathes even and slow, staring at a spot of nothing on the wall for hours as a part of himself crumbles.

.:.:.

He wakes up to the sound of an incessantly annoying beeping, with a gasp and the flutter of eyelids.

He's in a white room on a white bed wearing white, with a white box showing a jumping green line next to him. He stares at it for a moment, as it's the only sign of colour in the room, until he realizes that's where the beeping is coming from.

Trying to reach out to the machine to turn it off, he comes into difficulty. Looking down, he sees that his wrists are fastened to the bed with padded straps. Further investigation reveals that his ankles are, too.

"What…" His voice is rough, unused, and talking wakes up a flare of pain in his side and the back of his head. He yanks his arms again, panic fluttering to life in his breastbone.

He's not sure where he is or why he's there, but he's not supposed to be. He doesn't stop to examine where this thought comes from, only arches his back and yanks harder on his restraints.

Which sets of footsteps walking towards him, and he frowns as a pale brunette woman leans over him. "Sweetie, you need to calm down. No one's going to hurt you." She gives him a smile, and he leans away from her.

"Then why am I tied down?" The words come out rusty and ugly, and he coughs.

"Because no one includes yourself." She replies easily, and he snarls. She ignores that and checks on the beeping machine and at a bag of clear liquid, which, he realizes with horror, is attached to his arm. "I'm Nurse Jean. You're in Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, and you were admitted here two days ago. Can you tell me who you are?"

He freezes, because…

Because he can't. He looks away from Nurse Jean, his chest heaving as he thinks.

Hospital. He knows what that is. He knows what the Bronx is, knows what New York is.

But he doesn't know who he is.

"I…" The beeping has sped up to a faster pace, and Nurse Jean puts a hand on his arm.

"Calm down, sweetie. Do you remember who you are?"

The boy with black hair, shockingly blue eyes and scars all over his body looks away again, staring at a spot on the wall over Nurse Jean's shoulder.

"No."

A/N: Reviews are lovely things~ C:


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